Storyworth alternatives for families with young kids
Updated
If your kids are under 12, look for something they can do with their grandparent, not a book they'll read later: a weekly game built from the grandparent's stories, interviews the kids run themselves, a journal mailed back and forth, or a recorded memoir like Remento. Storyworth is still the best pick for a written life story.
Why look for a Storyworth alternative at all?
Storyworth does one thing well: it emails a storyteller a question every week for a year, then prints the answers as a hardcover book. On its own pricing page in November 2026, plans started at $69 (black-and-white book) and $99 (color book).
The catch for families with young kids is that the grandparent does the work and the children are an audience, years later. A 6-year-old won't read a 300-page memoir. If the point is a relationship now, you want something the grandkids take part in.
Which alternatives involve the grandkids directly?
- A weekly cooperative game built from the grandparent's stories. Ours turns their answers into a mystery: the grandparent holds half the clues and the grandkids hold the other half, so they solve it together on a call. Kids play from age 4.
- Kid-run interviews. Give your child three questions before each call and let them be the reporter. A free question list sorted by age makes this easy (try our question generator).
- A pass-back journal. Buy a notebook, write a question on the first page, and mail it to the grandparent. They answer, add a question for the child, and mail it back. It's slow, and kids love getting real post.
- A recipe project. The grandparent tells the story behind one family dish per month; you cook it together on a video call and the child draws the result for a homemade cookbook.
What if you want to keep their voice?
Remento is built around speaking: the storyteller answers prompts out loud, the recordings become written chapters, and the printed book has a QR code on each chapter that plays the original recording. Its site listed $99 for a year and one book in November 2026.
For free, StoryCorps has an app for recording an interview in person and a browser tool, StoryCorps Connect, for recording over video. Interviews go to the StoryCorps Archive at the Library of Congress (you choose whether to share them publicly), and participants must be 13 or older, so a parent or teen does the interviewing.
Which one fits which family?
- You want a book on the shelf: Storyworth (writing) or Remento (speaking).
- Your kids are 4 to 12 and calls fizzle: a weekly game or kid-run interviews.
- The grandparent loves paper and post: a pass-back journal.
- You want everything free: interviews on your phone's voice recorder, saved in a shared folder.
Can you combine them?
Yes, and it often works best. A memoir service collects the long version of a life; a weekly activity gives the grandkids a reason to hear it in small pieces. Many of the stories a grandparent tells while playing are the ones worth writing down later.
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